Tobias Wolff

But as my brother was doing his research for a book about my father, it became his opinion that the most influential anti-semitism my father encountered when he was growing up was from Jews, because his relatives were German Jews, and doctors.

It's probably why I'm a short story writer. I tend to remember things in the past in narrative form, in story form, and I grew up around people who told stories all the time.

Anybody can be very destructive in that position without at all meaning to be, and I know that I have been inadvertently destructive in the past for certain people on certain occasions.

Because the more you write the more you're aware of the weight of your tradition and the difficulties of the form and the more you have already done that you do not want to do again.

I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.

I love Chekhov. I could go on all day about him.

One of the last courses I taught was on the Russian short story, which I love.

And you can tell the writers who do it - Robert Stone, for example, who with each new novel is doing something new. I appreciate that in other writers.

Memory is funny. Once you hit a vein the problem is not how to remember but how to control the flow.

There's a joy in writing short stories, a wonderful sense of reward when you pull certain things off.

Work for most people is really very social, and the actual thinking is often done in community.

Because I don't have to be careful of people's feelings when I teach literature, and I do when I'm teaching writing.